It is July 1941 at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Prisoners are ordered to line up, and ten will be selected to starve to death in retaliation for a prisoner who appears to have escaped. When the Nazi commander selects Franciszek Gajowniczek, the prisoner cries out in dismay: “My wife! My children!” Then, to everyone’s amazement, another prisoner steps forward and volunteers to take Gajowniczek’s place. The guard is taken aback, and the prisoner has to repeat his request: “I am a Catholic priest from Poland; I would like to take his place because he has a wife and children.” The guard accepts the offer, and Gajowniczek gratefully returns to his place among the other prisoners. The Catholic priest who voluntarily took Gajowniczek’s place was Maximilian Kolbe. In 1982, Kolbe was canonized a saint by the Catholic Church, and Gajowniczek was present to honor the heroism of the man who saved his life.
What could motivate someone to accept death—and not just any death, but a slow, painful death by starvation—to save the life of a stranger? What could enable someone to endure such a death calmly and even cheerfully, to the point that the Nazi guards themselves expressed amazement at Kolbe’s courage? Of course, what Kolbe did went beyond the requirements of natural law—he had no moral obligation to sacrifice his life for his fellow prisoner. But it is nonetheless interesting to consider what could provide someone with sufficient rational motivation to make such a choice, especially since it was far from guaranteed that he would succeed in saving Gajowniczek’s life or enable him to reunite with his wife and children. After all, the Nazi guard could have scoffed at Kolbe’s offer and punished his boldness by taking him in addition to the other ten prisoners. And even if the offer to take Kolbe’s place was accepted, Gajowniczek’s chances of survival were still slim. Further, Gajowniczek’s wife and children were also likely to die before the end of the war, if they had not died already. In fact, his wife survived and he was reunited with her after the war, but his two sons were killed in a bombardment.
These sorts of uncertainties about whether our choices and actions will in fact give rise to the good outcomes that motivated them are not limited to such dramatic cases as this, but the high stakes in this case make the problem especially poignant. Indeed, though we do not often stop to think about it, most of the desired effects of our actions—the goods that we seek to protect or promote by our actions—rely on a host of contingent factors over which we have no direct control. Even a simple act such as taking a walk to get some exercise relies upon countless physical, biological, and chemical causes. Our ability to achieve the goods we seek is even more uncertain when the free cooperation of other human beings is required. To take an example likely to be familiar to many: the success of a teacher’s efforts in the classroom depends in no small part on the dispositions and choices of the students; on the other hand, the success of a student seeking to learn depends to a significant extent on whether the teacher explains the material in a clear, organized, and engaging manner.
Given all of these contingencies and uncertainties with regard to the fruits of our actions, one might easily be tempted to think: Is it really worth the effort to try to protect and promote human goods, acting in morally upright, virtuous ways, even when—as is often the case—this requires considerable toil and sacrifice? Can there be any assurance that our efforts and sacrifices will not be in vain?
Further, there are some cases in which it may seem that human goods might be more effectively promoted by violating moral norms rather than acting in accordance with those norms. In such cases, what can motivate us to act morally? What can assure us that, despite appearances to the contrary, violating moral norms is never truly compatible with integral human fulfillment?
My aim here is to consider how understanding God’s relationship to human flourishing and morality can alleviate these problems, providing a deeper grounding for moral obligation and moral motivation. I will consider this primarily from the perspective of what can be known by rational reflection—as is fitting for a work of philosophical ethics—but at the end of the article I will venture a few reflections from the perspective of Christian revelation.
God and Moral Obligation
In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky (through one of his characters) famously poses the question, “Without God, are all things permitted?” The answer to this question is both yes and no, depending on how the question is understood. Throughout Ethics, Politics, and Natural Law, I argue that we can come to recognize the existence of moral principles and norms through rational reflection. Knowledge of these norms and principles—knowledge of natural law—is not logically dependent on knowledge of God’s existence. Further, the moral force or obligatoriness of these norms is grounded on the directiveness of practical reason’s first principles, which guide us to respect and pursue human goods. In other words, practical reason directs us toward integral human fulfillment, and this necessary connection between practical reason’s directives and our flourishing gives moral force to those directives. The answer to Dostoyevsky’s question is no, therefore, insofar as one can know natural law, recognize its obligatoriness, and provide a sufficient rational justification for moral norms without knowledge of or reference to the existence or will of God.
At the same time, there are further questions about the moral order and moral obligation—questions related to the moral order’s ultimate metaphysical foundations—that can only be fully answered by recognizing that God is the source of the moral order. Analogously, a physicist can discover and demonstrate the truth of Newton’s laws of motion (for objects traveling below the speed of light) without adverting to the existence of God, but there are further questions about the source of the physical order and its intelligibility that cannot be fully answered without reference to God. The arguments for moral norms presented here, like the arguments for Newton’s laws presented by a physicist, are sufficient within the order of knowledge to which they belong, but nonetheless fail to answer further metaphysical questions about the very foundations of that order. Of course, an important difference between physical laws of motion and moral norms is that we can choose whether or not to follow moral norms. And this is why understanding that God is the ultimate source of the moral order does have practical relevance insofar as it can deepen our sense of moral obligation and moral motivation.
It is beyond my scope to present a full-fledged argument for the existence of God, but the very existence of a moral order and of human beings capable of knowing that order (along with the whole universe of other contingent beings whose existence does not explain itself ) can be the starting point for several lines of reasoning leading to the conclusion that there must be a necessary (non-contingent) being who is the ultimate, uncaused cause of all that exists, and of its order and intelligibility. Metaphysically speaking, therefore, the answer to Dostoyevsky’s question is yes insofar as everything (including the moral order) depends on God as its ultimate cause, and without God we would not even be here to ask the question. Thus Aquinas, in considering the natural law from a metaphysical perspective, refers to the natural law as “the rational creature’s participation of the eternal law,” which is God’s governance of the universe as a whole. And though on Aquinas’s view we can know the natural law and recognize its obligatoriness even without adverting specifically to God, recognizing God as natural law’s ultimate source can deepen our understanding of that law and of why we ought to follow it.
Once we recognize that the principles and norms by which practical reason directs us toward our good have their ultimate source in God, we can then recognize those principles and norms as guidance from God, who knows and seeks what is good for us. Grisez, Boyle, and Finnis explain that if God is the transcendent source of the directiveness of our practical reason, this implies that God is “a person anticipating human fulfillment and leading human persons toward it.” Further, we also recognize that our actions in pursuit of human goods depend for their fulfillment on countless causes outside our direct control. For example, in pressing on various keys to type this sentence, I am relying on the proper functioning of my muscles, on the laws of physics, on the various electrical and chemical reactions necessary for the keyboard to transmit information to the computer and for the computer to function correctly. Yet all of these causes upon which I rely also ultimately depend on God as their transcendent source. And so I can understand that the fruitfulness of my actions depends in a very real sense on God’s cooperation, thus seeing all of my actions as part of a cooperative endeavor with God.
This recognition can deepen our sense of moral obligation in several ways. First, if we understand moral norms as guidelines for flourishing given to us by a benevolent God, who is the source of our existence and nature and thus knows what our good is and how to promote it better than we do, our trust in the reliability of these norms increases. Consider, by comparison, the way in which small children trust the guidelines given to them by loving parents, because they trust that their parents know and want what is good for them. Of course, this analogy has limits, because parents—who, unlike God, are imperfect—can err in their judgment about what is good for a child, or impose rules for their own benefit rather than for the benefit of the child. But the comparison nonetheless helps to illustrate how our sense of moral obligation deepens when we identify the source of moral guidelines as a person who knows and seeks our good.
Second, if we see moral norms not as impersonal rules, but as personal invitations to cooperate with God in the promotion of human flourishing, our sense of moral obligation becomes personal. Even in cases when there is no other human being to whom we are directly accountable for the fulfillment of a particular moral obligation, we are always accountable to God. To put the same point slightly differently, even when no human relationship is likely to be damaged by our failure to act in a morally upright way, our relationship with God is still on the line. Again, thinking about parent-child relationships can be helpful here. Just as children’s desire to be in harmony with their parents provides an overarching reason to follow their guidelines, fostering and maintaining right relationship with God becomes an overarching reason to act morally when we recognize that God is the ultimate source of the moral order.
Third, and relatedly, if we know God is the source of our existence, of all the goods from which we benefit, of the practical principles and norms that guide us toward our flourishing, and of our capacity to know those principles and norms, then we can also recognize that all of these things are God’s gift to us, and that we owe God a profound debt of gratitude that we can never fully repay. One way of expressing this gratitude is to make proper use of these gifts by pursuing genuine goods in line with the moral guidelines that God has made accessible to us through practical reason (and also, as many believe, through divine revelation). We show our gratitude to other human beings in this way all the time. A woman might, for instance, wear a necklace given to her by her husband not only because she likes the necklace, but also to show her gratitude for the gift (and thus to foster and maintain a loving relationship with him). And she might take special care not to lose or damage the necklace for the same reason. Her gratitude—and related desire to strengthen their relationship—therefore gives her a reason to take care of the gift and use it in line with the giver’s intentions, a reason that she would not have if she had simply bought the necklace for herself. Similarly, our gratitude to God gives us an additional and overarching reason to pursue human goods in line with moral norms, thus deepening our sense of moral obligation.
God and Moral Motivation
The topic of moral motivation is not entirely separable from the topic of moral obligation, for on the account I have offered here, moral obligation is based on the connection between moral norms and human goods, and human goods are what provide us with a rational motivation to act. All the points made in the previous section therefore already tell us something about how recognizing God as the source of moral principles and norms strengthens our motivation to follow them, for a deeper and stronger sense of moral obligation corresponds directly to a deeper and stronger sense of moral motivation. Nevertheless, there is still more to be said about God and moral motivation, particularly when considering the difficulties for moral motivation presented at the beginning of this chapter. In particular, how can we have sufficient motivation to protect and promote human goods when doing so requires considerable effort and sacrifice, and/or when the desired fruits of our actions are far from guaranteed? Or, conversely, how can we be motivated to follow moral norms when violating them seems to promise great benefits? Recognizing that God is the source of the moral order helps to ameliorate these difficulties, but I do not think that the problem can be fully overcome unless we look beyond what we can know through rational reflection alone and consider the resources offered by Christian revelation. In this section I will consider how we can respond to these difficulties for moral motivation from a purely philosophical perspective, and then in the next section I will consider how Christian theology can offer a fuller resolution to these problems.
When we understand that God is the source of human goods, wants us to respect and promote them (because he wants us to flourish), and cooperates with us in our efforts to do so, this strengthens our moral motivation in at least two ways. First, if the various contingent factors on which we rely for the fruitfulness of our actions are aspects of an orderly, intelligible universe governed by the providence of a benevolent God, we can have greater confidence in the dependability of these factors, and greater hope that even if things do not turn out as we had planned, the unseen hand of providence will enable some good to come from our efforts. This hope in providence becomes much clearer and stronger when the promises of Christian revelation are added, but even without these additional promises, a reason-based belief in a benevolent and provident God is sufficient to give us at least a vague hope that our efforts to protect and promote human flourishing will not be in vain.
Second, and relatedly, if fostering and maintaining right relationship with God provides an overarching reason to act morally, this provides a source of moral motivation that is immune to the contingencies and uncertainties that affect our efforts to protect and promote other human goods. It is true that the good of personal integrity—most fully achieved through the cultivation of moral virtue—also provides one with a reason to act morally that does not depend on the external effects of our actions. Yet if one’s moral judgments are not bolstered by the conviction that moral norms are guidelines for human flourishing given to us by a benevolent and provident God, and by the recognition that our relationship with God is itself at stake in our decision to act in accordance with those judgments, it can be extremely difficult to resist the temptation to compromise one’s personal integrity in order to preserve or promote other goods that seem more tangible.
Imagine, for instance, that your country is in a just war, and that bombing civilian targets seems likely to bring a swift end to what would otherwise be a protracted conflict, on balance saving many lives for those on both sides. If you are a political leader, refusing to authorize such bombing because you believe that targeting noncombatants violates the moral prohibition on intentional destruction of basic human goods might even seem selfish, as if you were immorally prioritizing your integrity over the common good. This is, of course, a misleading and inaccurate way of framing the choice, for integrity consists in loving and respecting all the goods involved, and it is precisely this love and respect for the good in all of its basic dimensions that is the ground for refusing to intentionally destroy any basic human good. In other words, violating a moral norm is always contrary to integral human fulfillment, and thus contrary to the genuine common good. Yet in a situation such as this one, this consideration may seem too intangible, too difficult to believe in the face of the more tangible calculations about how many lives the bombing will save. Recognizing that what is on the line in this situation is not only one’s personal integrity, but also one’s relationship with God, and also recognizing that God seeks our good and knows better than we do how to promote it, can powerfully bolster one’s motivation to act morally even in the midst of such a difficult situation.
Christian Revelation and the Promise of the Kingdom of God
The considerations offered in the previous sections show how a purely reason-based belief in a benevolent and provident God can help to deepen our sense of moral obligation and bolster our moral motivation, in large part by strengthening our conviction that acting morally does ultimately protect and promote human flourishing. Yet the reassurances that rational reflection alone can provide in this regard are relatively vague and weak. Further, although the claims made in the previous sections can in principle be known through philosophical reflection, in practice this knowledge can be quite difficult to attain through reason alone. Thus, even though mine is a book about natural law—about what we can know about ethics and morality through natural reason—it nonetheless seems helpful to close by briefly considering how Christian revelation can more fully resolve the difficulties for moral motivation that were outlined above.
Because it is beyond my scope to present (let alone defend) an account of Christianity’s core tenets, my discussion here presumes familiarity with the basic claims of Christianity, and focuses only on one element of Christian revelation that is particularly relevant for the problem of moral motivation. That element is Jesus’s proclamation of the Kingdom of God and his promise that those who believe in him and follow his teaching (summarized in the dual commandment to love God and neighbor) will ultimately enjoy fullness of life in the Kingdom. The promised Kingdom is not presented as an abstraction or as a purely spiritual reality, but is presented as a city, a heavenly Jerusalem, in which the saints, with glorified bodies, like that of the resurrected Jesus, will live in perfect communion with God and each other, and flourish in every dimension of their being. This Kingdom is not to be understood as an extrinsic reward that lacks any intrinsic connection to our choices and actions in this life; rather it is a Kingdom that is in some respect already present, a Kingdom that we can contribute to and participate in through our morally upright choices and actions, and that we can reject and exclude ourselves from through immoral choices and actions (or failures to act).
The inherent connection between the promised Kingdom and moral norms can be seen by recalling natural law’s master moral principle: Choose and act only in ways that are compatible with a will toward integral human fulfillment. Integral human fulfillment is the all-around fulfillment of human beings within a perfectly harmonious community. In other words, what makes choices and actions morally upright is their compatibility with membership in an ideal community, a community in which all members are flourishing in all of the dimensions of their being, and live together united in perfect peace and harmony. Morally upright choices and actions maintain openness to all human goods and to community with all human beings; thus morally upright choices and actions are an implicit participation in and contribution to the ideal community to which the term “integral human fulfillment” refers.
From the perspective of what we can know through reason alone, integral human fulfillment is an ideal, not an achievable goal. This is not only because of the moral obstacles to the achievement of this ideal in a world of imperfectly virtuous human beings, but also because of the inherent limitation of human mortality—for the ideal community would, in principle, be open not just to those human beings who are currently alive, but to all human beings, past, present, and future. From the perspective of reason alone, therefore, we can act with hope that our actions will contribute to the approximation of this ideal insofar as is possible, and this hope will be bolstered if we recognize that there is a benevolent and provident God, but there are no assurances that even this more limited hope will be fulfilled.
Christianity’s promise of the Kingdom, however, indicates that integral human fulfillment can and will be realized through God’s action and with our cooperation. Indeed, the promise of the Kingdom surpasses the ideal of integral human fulfillment insofar as it includes a promise of more-than human fulfillment—of a type of communion with God that goes beyond the human good of religion, and that we are made capable of participating in through the gift of grace. Here, however, I will focus on the Kingdom as a realization of the ideal of integral human fulfillment, a perfect community in which we will flourish on all dimensions of our being. This fullness of life in the Kingdom is not an extrinsic reward, but is prepared by and in continuity with our morally upright pursuit of human goods during our earthly life. By acting morally—maintaining openness to all human goods and to community with all human beings, which is equivalent to loving all persons by loving their good in all of its dimensions—we are thus at least implicitly preparing ourselves for membership in the Kingdom. And all of the morally upright acts by which we have sought to protect and promote human goods will come to full fruition in the Kingdom, even if those efforts appear to fail here on earth, in line with Saint Paul’s promise that “in the Lord your labor is not in vain.” “After we have promoted on earth . . . the goods of human dignity, fraternal communion, and liberty—that is to say, all the good fruits of our nature and effort—then we shall find them once more, but cleansed of all dirt, illuminated, and transformed, when Christ gives back to the Father an eternal and universal kingdom,” states the Second Vatican Council in Gaudium et spes.
This reassurance that our labor is not in vain, that our good deeds will ultimately bear fruit, can powerfully strengthen our motivation to undertake difficult projects or make great personal sacrifices to promote human flourishing, even when the success of our efforts on this earth seems highly uncertain. Further, knowing that the heavenly Kingdom is constituted by our love for God, for one another, and for all the goods that constitute our flourishing helps us to resist the temptation to try to promote the good through immoral means, for such immoral means close us off from and undermine the Kingdom by closing us off from and undermining love of some person or good. Recognizing that moral norms are God’s guidelines for integral human flourishing and for building up the Kingdom where that flourishing will be fully realized, we are also assured that immoral means will never actually be effective in promoting integral human flourishing. Indeed, it would be hubris to judge that we know better than God does how best to promote human flourishing, but if we understand that God is the author of the moral law, such a judgment is implicit in any choice to use immoral means in order to achieve a good end. The Christian promise of the Kingdom therefore provides the fullest solution to the difficulties for moral motivation that arise from uncertainties about the fruitfulness of our actions, or from the apparent probability that violating moral norms will more effectively promote the human good than following them.
Conclusion
The overarching theme of Ethics, Politics, and Natural: Principles for Human Flourishing, reflected in its title, has been to highlight the intrinsic connection between morality and human flourishing. Ultimately, morality matters because human flourishing matters, and we should want to be moral because we want to flourish. Acting morally, following moral norms, protects and promotes our flourishing by contributing to and making possible our membership in the perfect human community where our human flourishing (which is inherently social) would be complete. This connection between morality and human flourishing is sufficient to justify moral norms and ground our obligation to follow them. Yet from the perspective of reason alone, this perfect human community—corresponding to the concept of integral human fulfillment—is an unrealizable ideal. The Christian concept of the Kingdom transforms this ideal into a promised reality, strengthening us with the sure hope that our morally upright efforts to protect and promote human goods will ultimately bear fruit.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Ethics, Politics, and Natural Law: Principles for Human Flourishing (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.
Professor Moschella will participate in the True Genius: The Mission of Women in Church and Culture conference on March 26-28, 2025 at the University of Notre Dame. Recordings of the event sessions will be made available at a later date.
